General Introduction and Project Goals

The UC History Digital Archives (UCHDA) is a program
of the University Archives at the Bancroft Library.

Project Goals:

To organize and collaborate with other efforts to preserve and provide Web access to digital archival materials related to the history of the University of California  including developing digitization standards and

To provide a universitywide resource for the academic community and the general public.

To promote discussion on the history of the university and its future and provide new methods for scholarly communication.

The intent of the UCHDA is to create a sophisticated, high quality venue for access to digitized collections and materials identified by the project, and with links to existing and future digitized collections related to the history of the University, and more generally higher education in California.

Project Research Design and Web Site Standards

To determine the interests and functional requirements of potential users, UCHDA staff conducted a preliminary needs assessment in spring 2001, interviewing historians, archivists, and researchers with a stated interest in university history, higher education, and California history, about their potential use of the UCHDA. As content is added to the site, and as resources permit, UCHDA staff will conduct usability tests to evaluate the effectiveness of the organization of and access to its collections.

Selected historical documents are converted to full-text digital files and marked up using Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) with the Text Encoding Initiative document type definition (DTD). The primary SGML collection is currently delivered by Dynaweb, which generates HTML on the fly, so that users can access the collection with the popular web browsers, Netscape and Internet Explorer. The contextual gateway employs traditional HTML markup. The UCHDA expects that in the future the site will be available in XML format, which will offer a seamless interface between primary resources and contextual materials.